What we will build is not the ship, is an habitat over it. We could say that Earth (or our solar system) is our spaceship now, and no matter how much buildings we have on it, it is natural. What turns it into a ship is that we build it piece by piece or that it bring us to a destination?

If we can make habitats on big enough asteroids and deviate them from their orbits toward those star systems, they could be considered natural spaceships.

That the sound changes leaves the main phase will take millons to billons of years. In the other hand, our civilization has been around for 10k years, and in the last 100 we developed (and actually used against ourselves) a lot of technologies that could end mankind or even all life on earth, and with time the opportunities to do it with more severe consequences will be more, not less. I would give more chances that we manage to actually travel 14 light years (with all the complexities involved) than mankind and/or our civilization would last for another 10k years.

It should be a warning sign that climate scientists are still being surprised by unexpected consequences caused directly or indirectly by global warming, specially of the kind that could do a possitive feedback to the loop. We predict based on what we know, what we observe, and what we model after it. That we are missing on the consequences is not a reason to calm down, but to hurry up, as more things could be impacted and the 200-500 years could turn end being 200-500 months or even days, or hit in an unexpected direction (i.e. temperature or water level didn't rise a lot, but ocean acidification break the food chain, and that affect atmosphere composition)

US government owes each person of the world several trillons because copyright infringment in that case. And if the US government don't comply with copyright laws, why the rest of the world should?

Maybe they should start giving more responsibilities and capabilities to the expert systems running in the computers aboard to do all those tasks. Lets start the HAL series.

That is pocket change compared with the 38 millon Adobe users of last year or the 7 millon dropbox users last october.. Even Sony hack of the data of internal users were in those order of numbers.

Thats the start of the problem. People control the software. Like with guns, is people that is the one that kills, abuse, take advantage or use it for their own ends, giving them more tools to control our life is letting not only the saint, pure and morally perfect and responsible ones to do so, but all of them, at all levels. People is not perfect, either the one that decides what the software should do, the ones that actually does that, or the ones that in the end have the capabilities to control them, and in that way, you. You know how police can behave already, give them and people in higher more control, and that won't stop them to misbehave, just give them new ways to do it, with more broad impact and the possibility of doing it without consequences nor leaving a trace.

And if not bad enough the people with their own interests, biases and corruption in the "right" side of the controlling that software, it is not perfect, and you have vulnerabilities, design faults, leaks and plain idiocy at the hour of deciding who can control that software that could let not authorized people to do that control too. And they can do pretty bad misuses too.

And you are in the center of it, not knowing, not having a warning, not having any possibility of control, In some moment shit will happen because of this and you will be dead, without savings or property, working as a slave or maybe worse consequences. And maybe, not even realizing that all of that already happened.

The original story was a books for childs that started with "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" and kept being childish most of the way. This movie? "Die Hard: Dwarfs edition", deserving a PG-13 or R rating for violence and mass slaughtering. It was like watching the porn version of Cindirella. The basic elements were there, but is not the same.

Anyway, may worth to see the CGI work.

But only if they are the ones doing it. Who watches the watchers?

Somewhat the right of privacy of a corporation matters, while the right of privacy of basically 99.99% of mankind (at least, of the ones with access to internet) has been abolished. Do as I say, not as i do.

Better yet, try to discern by voice something like "Allá se halla la aya, bajo aquella haya"

In spanish most of those words sounds pretty much alike, and in some cases have several different meanings.

In the other hand, what can't be denied is that global warming provides more energy to the climate system. And in a system so complex that is the root of the butterfly effect concept adding more fuel will affect it, maybe even in ways that we didn't realized yet. And with a civilization that is rooted in stable and predictable climates (agriculture depends on that) it will hit us pretty hard in all those ways.

Low on tornadoes, high in other big storms by any other name, like Cyclone Phailin, Typhoon Haiyan and Vongfong, Hurricane Marie and others, in the last 2 years.

Is the sort of things that happens with very complex and interrelated systems. We make models, and sometimes don't know how many factors plays in or the importance of some of them. But impredictability is something that should scare you more than dismiss this as a potential danger. If a big possitive feedback mechanism is not yet discovered or understood for global warming (a bit like this big methane release, but maybe worse/faster/whatever) once global climate hit a critical point, things can go wrong very fast, very global, and in a very irrevocable way.